Irradiated Namibian Uranium Miners Demand Compensation

By Greg Dropkin, Mail and Guardian, 31 July, 1997

No goggles or masks amid the dust Four ailing Namibian miners appeared
on British television to talk about working conditions on a
British-owned mine that supplied no masks or goggles to miners working
in radioactive dust.

BBC TV this week broadcast statements from four mineworkers who claim
their ill-health resulted from poor working conditions at the Rossing
Uranium mine.

The BBC's main in-depth news programme, Newsnight, interviewed Edward
Connelly, who yesterday won the right to bring his N$3 million
compensation case in the UK, Petrus Hwaibe, Petrus Naibab, and featured
an archive statement from the late Peter Carlson, who died from cancer
in 1994.

Connelly, who worked at the mine from battle 1977 to 1982, told the BBC
that when he started working at Rossing: "Nobody had a mask there,
nobody, at the mine... they never offered them a mask. We were told it
was quite safe, it's low grade, babies you know just to stand back away
from the dust, which is impossible."

In response Rossing's Manager for Corporate Affairs, Gida Sekandi, told
Newsnight: "We do not believe that Mr Connelly worked in those kind of
conditions or that his medical condition could have been caused by him
working here."

Peter Carlson worked in the mine's crushers at the same time as
Connelly. In 1994 shortly before he died from cancer of the gullet
Carlson stated: "I was covered in dust all the time I worked in the
crushers. No respirators, only goggles were supplied in the early
years. There was no place to sit and eat that was protected from the
dust. There was no shade. There were no ablution facilities or
changing facilities".

Petrus Hwaibe, who still works in the Rossing laboratories, has
aplastic anaemia (collapse of the bone marrow). He told BBC reporter
Peter Marshall that he was ready to follow Connelly's case and bring
his compensation case in Britain.

Petrus Naibab, who worked in the Open Pit from the early 1980s, is
thought to have non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a cancer which is associated
with radiation exposure). He says he had a mask, but took it off to
eat, despite the dust. "Was it dangerous?" he was asked. "It is. I
think about it, but I have no choice. I'm hungry, I must eat."

Rossing's Sekandi maintained that a 1992 audit by the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had confirmed that the mine's safety
standards were acceptable.

But David Myers, the IAEA health assessor for the 1992 report, told the
BBC that radiation records before 1980-81 were "shaky, skimpy, and
flimsy. I don't know about exposure to radioactive dust. That
information wasn't available."

Rossing's parent company, RTZ, refused to be interviewed for the
programme.